How To Design Landing Pages That Convert For Your Funnel

Christopher Lier
Monday, July 16, 2018

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Landing pages are a powerful tool in an online marketing strategy. Helping marketers and businesses achieve conversions, landing pages have become indispensable. There are many advantages why to choose landing page over websites or non-optimized pages. At the end of the day, it all comes down to conversion. If your page converts, you are getting business. If it doesn’t convert, you obviously won’t.

Whoever builds your page needs a skillset in many different areas. Professional landing pages are not easy to build because they need to appeal to web visitors in just a few seconds. Furthermore, don’t forget that a landing page normally gets seen by 100s, 1000s or even more people. They become your business card, the first impression for cold leads. The question becomes: what are the aspects that matter to make a landing page a profitable source of business?

The choice you have is to design the page yourself or hire a designer. Another choice to make is to go with a template design. You might be thinking why does it require so much effort? My website needs to be professional, but my landing pages? Why can’t I experiment and just see how it goes?

Well, you can do it exactly this way, but it is very likely that you will fail. Not only does a landing page campaign involve the web design itself, it also needs a traffic generator targeted at the right audience. Often, this is a Pay-per-Click or ad campaign. All these factors of targeting, design, user experience, copywriting and sales language, psychological factors, monitoring and optimization make a landing page campaign complex.

If you design the page yourself, you can use established tools like Clickfunnels, Unbounce, Wix landing page builder. Some of them are easier, some more advanced for users. This way of approaching landing page development can be successful if you have the right technical equipment. However, the reality is that it needs a thoughtful approach and at least some industry knowledge in digital marketing.

The choice of hiring a professional designer comes with the benefit of receiving a landing page which has higher chances of converting. Although, be careful who you hire to do your page. These days, the low entry barriers into the digital marketing space allow anyone to label themselves as an expert. It doesn’t take long to recognize that there is a huge difference between mediocre and professional design.

The crucial factors that make a difference are conversion-focus, understanding of branding, seamless integration of opt-in fields and buttons and more. Many people understand design, other people understand data, but few can bring them together. And that is the simple way of defining what makes a great landing page: It’s data combined with design.

A landing page designer or a web design agency can use tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to develop the artwork on which the landing page will be based on. This is necessary to clearly understand what the final product will look like. It’s not really a solution to go with a custom template unless they are specific to your industry. Imagine that you can find a template which is fully optimized for a niche like “Dental implant solutions for private Healthcare Patients in the UK”. This way it can work if the template has been refined and tested over time for conversion.

With regards to data and analytics, the importance of split-testing and further monitoring comes into play. Landing page builder tools often allow the split of traffic onto different variations. This is one of the most powerful marketing techniques for landing pages and certainly worth implementing into your campaign. This is a task that can possibly be done by inexperienced users after they have the landing page designed. It just requires the initial set-up of a least two variations which then allows you to check what works and what doesn’t work.

In case you like to use more advanced analytics, Heatmaps are an option of analysing user behaviour in a granular way and will allow you to monitor the landing page campaign even better.

To summarize, a landing page is more than just a simple page, it’s THE contact point where you present an offer and your business to the market. Making a campaign work requires effort and skills. There are different ways to approach landing page design and certainly technology has made it easier for everyone to develop pages and campaigns. However, the benefit of a professionally designed landing page becomes indispensable when you are an ambitious marketer or business who wants results. Choose your designer based on conversion-focus, not merely design skills. That will make all the difference and will skyrocket your campaign into scalable online growth.